Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement.
On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. While her action was not the first of its kind to impact the civil rights issue (see also Lizzie Jennings in 1854, Irene Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, Claudette Colvin on the same bus system nine months before Parks), Parks' individual action of civil disobedience created further impact by sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Parks' act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.
Although widely honored in later years for her action, she suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store. Eventually, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers. After retirement from this position, she wrote an autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years she suffered from dementia, and became involved in a lawsuit filed on her behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast.
Parks eventually received many honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Her death in 2005 was a major story in the United States' leading newspapers. She was granted the posthumous honor of lying in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.
Most attractive black women,Rosa Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement but suffered hardships as a result. She lost her job at the department store, and her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke extensively. In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Hampton, Virginia; mostly because she was unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with King and other leaders of Montgomery's struggling civil rights movement. In Hampton, she found a job as a hostess in an inn at the historically black Hampton Institute. Later that year, after the urging of her brother and sister-in-law, Sylvester & Daisy McCauley, Rosa Parks, her husband Raymond, and her mother Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965 when African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988. In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene — just a very special person ... There was only one Rosa Parks. Later in life, Parks served as a member of the Board of Advocates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The 1970s was a decade of loss and suffering for Parks, though more due to personal problems than racism or other social issues. Her family was plagued with illness; she and her husband had suffered stomach ulcers for years and both required hospitalization. More serious was when her brother Sylvester, her husband Raymond, and her mother Leona all were diagnosed with cancer within a relatively short period of time, causing Parks to sometimes have to visit three hospitals in the same day. In spite of her fame and constant speaking engagements (most of the money for which, above expenses, she donated to civil rights causes) Parks was not a wealthy woman. She lived on her salary and her husband's pension. Medical bills and time missed from work caused financial strain that required her to accept assistance from church groups and admirers. Her husband died of throat cancer on August 19, 1977 and her brother, her only sibling and to whom she was very close, died of cancer the following November. Personal ordeals caused her to become increasingly removed from the civil rights movement; in her memoir she writes that it was a major blow to her when she learned from a newspaper that Fannie Lou Hamer, once a close friend, had died several months before. An injury from an accidental fall while walking on an icy sidewalk briefly hospitalized Parks with two broken bones, causing her considerable and recurring pain thereafter and convincing her to move into an apartment for senior citizens. There she nursed her mother, Leona Edwards McCauley, through the final stages of her own illnesses (cancer and geriatric dementia) until she died in 1979 at the age of 92.
In 1980 Parks, now widowed and without immediate family, rededicated herself to founding and fund raising for civil rights and educational organizations. She co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for college-bound high school seniors, to which she donated most of her speaker fees. In February 1987 she co-founded, with Elaine Eason Steele, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an institute that runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. Though her health declined as she entered her seventies, she continued to make as many appearances and devote as much energy as possible to these endeavors.
In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed at younger readers which details her life leading up to her decision not to give up her seat. In 1995, she published her memoirs, titled Quiet Strength, which focuses on the role that her faith had played in her life.
On August 30, 1994, Joseph Skipper, an African-American drug addict, attacked 81-year-old Parks in her home. The incident sparked outrage throughout the United States. After his arrest, Skipper said that he had not known he was in Parks' home but recognized her after entering. Skipper asked, "Hey, aren't you Rosa Parks?" to which she replied, "Yes." She handed him $3 when he demanded money, and an additional $50 when he demanded more. Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the face.[37] Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and entering offenses against Parks and other neighborhood victims. He admitted guilt and, on August 8, 1995, was sentenced to eight to 15 years in prison.[38] Suffering anxiety upon returning to her too small central Detroit house following the ordeal, she moved into Riverfront Towers, a secure high rise apartment building where she lived for the rest of her life.
In 1994 the Ku Klux Klan applied to sponsor a portion of United States Interstate 55 in Saint Louis County and Jefferson County, near St. Louis, Missouri for clean up (which allowed them to have signs stating that this section of highway was maintained by the organization). Since the state could not refuse the KKK's sponsorship, the Missouri legislature voted to name the highway section the "Rosa Parks Highway". When asked how she felt about this honor, she is reported to have commented, "It is always nice to be thought of.
In March 1999, a lawsuit (Rosa Parks v. LaFace Records) was filed on Parks' behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records, claiming that the group had illegally used Rosa Parks' name without her permission for the song "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single of OutKast's 1998 album Aquemini. The lawsuit was settled April 15, 2005. In the settlement agreement, OutKast and their producer and record labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement and agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in creating educational programs about the life of Rosa Parks. The record labels and OutKast admitted to no wrongdoing. It is not known whether Parks' legal fees were paid for from her settlement money or by the record companies.
A comedic scene in the 2002 film Barbershop featured a cantankerous barber, played by Cedric the Entertainer, arguing with co-workers and shop patrons that other African Americans before Parks had resisted giving up their seats in defiance of Jim Crow laws, and that she had received undeserved fame because of her status as an NAACP secretary. Activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton launched a boycott against the film, contending it was "disrespectful", but NAACP president Kweisi Mfume stated he thought the controversy was "overblown. The scene offended Parks, who boycotted the NAACP 2003 Image Awards ceremony, which Cedric hosted. Barbershop received nominations in four categories, including a "Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture" nomination for Cedric.
In 2002 Parks received an eviction notice from her $1800 per month apartment due to non-payment of rent. Parks herself was incapable of managing her own financial affairs by this time due to age related physical and mental decline, and her rent was paid from a collection taken by Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit. When her rent again became delinquent and her impending eviction was highly publicized in 2004, executives of the company that owned her apartment building announced that they had forgiven the back rent and that Parks, by then 91 and in extremely poor health, was welcome to live rent free in the building for the remainder of her life. Allegations that her financial affairs had been mismanaged began during the eviction proceedings and continued after her death among her heirs and various organizations.
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